“You still there, Natalie?”

“Yes.” I lick my dry lips. “Just, um, visualizing it. It’s been a long time.”

His voice gets lower, quieter. “Tell me what you’ve been missing.”

He must read the yearning in my voice, but he doesn’t ask if I’m lonely, because he knows I am. So instead he asks what I want.

“Everything. I miss just the cuddling, but I guess a lot of guys aren’t into that. Just lying around for hours, wrapped up in each other.”

“What else do you want?”

You.

“Touch. The warmth of a palm on my knee.” I breathe in, once and then another time, trying to regain some control. I’m breathless and anxious but not panicked. The need for reassurance is strong. I hate that I’m so vulnerable, but I need to accept my weaknesses. That’s one thing Dr. Terrance has impressed upon me and truthfully it works. Other, more experienced women might be able to play coy but I can’t. Uncertainty generates panic for me, and I’d rather ask a dumb question and be shot down than not know what is going on. Bluntly I ask, “What’s happening between us?”

“We’re getting to know each other better.”

“I wasn’t expecting this,” I admit. I rub my neck, imagining that it is his palm on my chest and his weight against my body, his flesh pushing into mine.

“True for me as well,” he says. “But not all surprises are bad. I’m a big believer in the whole concept of things happening for a reason.”

“What about your loss? What was the reason behind that?” I hope it doesn’t come across as snotty. I am genuinely curious.

“I saved a friend,” he answers immediately. “And just so you don’t think I’m bragging, I’ll tell you it was pure accident. If he’d have jumped out of the Humvee before me, he’d have been hit, and he didn’t have the resources like I did. I’m pretty fortunate that I’m alive. I have a great family and a healthy bank account that allowed me access to things other folks don’t have.”

I can’t respond right away because my throat is thick with emotion. Of course he views himself as blessed by his circumstances, but what he won’t ever acknowledge is how he’s embraced his losses and healed both in body and spirit. In reality, his good life is due to his hard work at achieving that spiritual equilibrium that has eluded me for so long. But his courage inspires me.

“I’m scared of many things,” I whisper into the phone. “But not of you.”

“Good. I’ll never give you a reason to be afraid of me. I understand where you are coming from, Natalie. If your only contact with me is over the phone for a while, we’ll get creative.” His throaty words thrill me. “I suspect writers are really good at being inventive.”

It seems impossible, but this man appears to be telling me that he’s willing to date me over the phone for as long as it takes for me to open the door. With someone who fainted at the sight of a clown. How is this even possible?

“So tomorrow night? I’ll bring the Chinese food with me and leave you the extra food. How do things get delivered?”

Trying to stop myself from smiling, trying to stop my heart from fluttering, I answer as evenly as possible. “The doorman calls me, tells me he’s going to bring them up. He sets it by my door. He rings my bell and I wait to hear the elevator ding as he leaves, and then I open it. A lot of stuff Oliver brings up.”

“Okay, then, tomorrow that’s what we’ll do.”

“What if I can’t open the door?”

“Then you don’t open it.” His response is matter-of-fact, as if he doesn’t care that our date might be aborted because I can’t even twist a doorknob.

“How can that be okay for you?”

“Why don’t you let me worry about what’s okay for me, and you worry about you?”

“Okay,” I say, and the last syllable is swallowed by a hiccup. Tears are forming. They aren’t unhappy tears, but tears at this man’s amazing generosity. “Excuse me. There’re onions everywhere in my apartment.”

“Take your time.”

“I’m really having a hard time keeping it together. Because of, you know, the onions.”

His reply is full of understanding. “I’ll call you tomorrow, sweetheart. Have sweet dreams.”

“Thanks.” I manage to hold it together until he hangs up, and then I roll over and cry the happiest tears I’ve felt in a long time.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

JAKE

“What kind of progress are we making on the note and the clown messenger?” I ask my tech guy, Devon Zachs.

Zachs’s inky black hair is stuck up in fifty different directions, and from the number of crumpled potato chip bags littering his desk, I’m wondering when he last left the cellar office.

He claimed this space when I first opened, jokingly saying he planned to drink all the wine from my nonexistent collection. The space was originally designed to house hundreds of bottles of wine and liquor. We tore down the shelves and put in storage units and a bunker that held all our electronic equipment as well as a storage locker full of enough ammunition to arm a small militia. Too many years in the army.

He taps his pen against the far left monitor in his bank of five large screens. “The note is a nonstarter. It’s plain white paper used in millions of offices around the world. It’s printed with an inkjet printer, which probably points to home use. I don’t know what type of ink. We can get that analyzed, but it’s probably just standard ink.

“The clown messenger information is more interesting. The email address that was used to pay him comes from an unverified PayPal account. We can try to hack into it, but hacking individual accounts is a lot harder than a system-wide hack, if you can believe that. We’d need to use a bit of social engineering, and we don’t have enough on the account other than the username dd1995dd. 1995 is an interesting choice, because it’s kind of a bland year. Could be his birthday. I tried a few passwords based on a 1995 date of birth, but came up empty. We don’t really have the computer processing power for hacking, though it’s not like we couldn’t get it. We’ve just never done it in the past. But as we both know, that would be illegal. And given that it’s a financial institution, the penalties could be quite heavy.”

Zachs looks unperturbed and almost a little excited about the idea of hacking into a bank. “What are our other options?” I ask.

“I set a tracer on the email. Maybe he’s left a review about bad service in the city or something. We’ll see. People leave unintentional tracks all over the place.”

“You think it’s a he?”

He furrows his brow. “I guess so. What’s he get out of it anyway?”

I tend to agree with him. “He likes the power, the feeling that he can make her afraid at any time, which is why I want you to look into Joshua James Terrance. He’s a psychiatrist. His offices are on Madison and East 59th Street.”

“So you think he’s the asshole?”

“I don’t know. But it’s someone who knows her very well, and currently her circle of people is small.”

“What about the ex-boyfriend?”

“Our tail on him doesn’t think he’s the guy. We can’t find any connection between him and the clown.”

“If it’s the doc, man, that’s so wrong. You make her sick so you can keep treating her? That’s fucked up.”

“I’ll have the boyfriend tail take a look at his other patients. See if we can’t identify them and then see if they’ve made any harassment reports. Maybe we can nail him on pattern and practice.”